Sunday, January 18, 2015

In light of my previous post, many of you have probably deduced that I'm graduating (if you're following me on facebook then it's pretty obvious). And for a student, such as myself who is enrolled in the institution and program that I am in, to graduate, we need to fully deploy and document our final IT Project or capstone project as most universities like to put it.

Graduating BSIT kidz

So I'm young. And like all young people, I'm heavily idealistic, occasionally arrogant and frankly, naive about how the world works. I know that and I digress; is that really so bad? To try and work for an, often times, impossible dream?

Having those thoughts drive me though the whole beginning of the project's development led me to make things more challenging for myself. Considering our previous proposal was dismissed, we were to work on a new, abeit simpler project. Being as arrogant as I am, I pushed myself and ended up creating the project not in the traditionally taught programming languages of the school (C, Java, PHP), but in an entirely new language that I grew to love over my internship: Python.

It's not that I look down on the mentioned languages (I'm no expert in them either and am open to further study), it's just that I wanted to be of use somehow to my future workplace and what's the best way to find out the ins and outs of a language that to take on a project that you've never done before with it. So my team and I got to work on the documentation which was the easier part of the project. Once the basics were done, I got to work on the actual program.

And let me tell you: what I ended up with was not what I imagined. It looked like a roller coaster on meth and it worked like one too. I understood Python was developed for the web but I, being all high and mighty as I am, thought that it would work just as well for GUI programming. Granted, the layout and everything was simple enough to understand but the functionality was just horrible and I knew I could do better if I had a mentor or someone who at least understood the language with me to talk to but those resources aren't available to me at the moment. (Also considering that Python isn't normally used for gui programming, online forums didn't help as much. Or am I wrong?)

A moment of panic hit me that weekend. I can't do it, I realized. I would either have to re-do everything in a another programming language or grit through it and just keep on researching; but time wasn't kind to me.

Now, I'm around thirty percent done with the project with two more modules of functionality in progress and a layout that needs fine-tuning. I got over that wave of panic that evening after a good few rounds of Halo on the Xbox and, in the end, decided to get over my big head and work with something more reasonable, considering the situation; Java.

I learned a lot after that mistake and hope to put that new experience to good use in the future. But I don't think I'll ever stop being idealistic and big-headed though. Maybe just kick it down a notch from time to time.